THE VERY ESSENCE OF
SALVATION************************************
‘OBEY MY VOICE’

By Andrew
Murray -
(1828-1917)

Would God that we
could learn that all that God speaks of sacrifices, even of the
sacrifice of His beloved Son, is subordinate to the one thing –
to have His creature restored to full obedience. Into all
the inconceivable meaning of the word, ‘I WILL BE YOUR GOD,’
there is no gateway but this, ‘OBEY MY VOICE.’

WE COME TO THE NEW
TESTAMENT – Here we think at once of our blessed
Lord, and the prominence He gives to obedience as the one thing
for which He was come into the world. He who entered it with His
‘Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God,’ever confessed to men,‘I seek not My own will, but the will of Him
that sent Me.’

Of all He did
and of all He suffered, even to the death, He said, ‘This
commandment have I received of My Father.’

If we turn to
His teaching, we find everywhere, that the obedience He rendered
is what He claims from everyone who would be His disciple.

During His whole
ministry, from beginning to end, obedience is – THE VERY ESSENCE
OF SALVATION.

In the Sermon on
the Mount He began with it:No one could enter the
kingdom, ‘but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in
heaven.’

And in the
farewell discourse, how wonderfully He reveals the spiritual
character of true obedience as it is born of love and inspired
by it, and as it also opens the way into the love of God. Do
take into your heart the wonderful words, (John 14:15, 16, 21,
23), ‘If ye love Me, ye will keep my commandments. And the
Father will send forth the Spirit. He hath My commandments and
keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me: and he shall be loved of
My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself unto
him. If a man love Me, he will keep My words: and My Father will
love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with
him.’

No words could
express more simply or more powerfully the inconceivably
glorious place Christ gives to obedience, with its twofold
possibility, (1) as only possible to a loving heart,
(2) as making possible all that God has to give of His Holy
Spirit, of His wonderful love, of His indwelling in Christ
Jesus.

I know of no passage
in Scripture that gives a higher revelation of the spiritual
life, or the power of loving obedience as its one condition. Let
us pray to God very earnestly that by His Holy Spirit its light
may transfigure our daily obedience with its heavenly glory.
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